


The Devil's in the Details

by nenena



Series: 42_souls Kid/Liz/Patti Challenge [4]
Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Action/Adventure, Community: 42_souls, Family, Humor, Multi, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-29
Updated: 2008-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:12:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nenena/pseuds/nenena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of four short stories about one old house. In which there is balance, baking, ghosts, and a passing of the torch. Pairing: Liz/Kid/Patti OT3ness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Palindromes and Butterflies

**The Devil's in the Details**

four short stories about one old house, for 42_souls

**Part One: Just Checking**

**(palindromes and butterflies)**

* * *

Technically, it was still _his _house, but in name and deed only. Either way, however, the Grim Reaper certainly felt entitled to drop in every now and then, if only just to see how the kids were doing. Even if it wasn't his home anymore, he was still welcome there. (Most of the time.) And of course, because it was his nature to be observant, he couldn't help but notice the many ways that the house itself seemed to change with every visit.

The invasion had started slowly. One time, a lone bottle of bright pink nail polish left sitting near the edge of a sleek black coffee table. A library book – evidence of somebody actually doing _homework, _for once – left open and resting beside a lamp. Handprints on the banisters, as if people had actually touched them. Pillows on a couch re-arranged, and then mismatched. More and more shoes fighting for space in the cubby near the front entryway, a clutter of high-heeled boots and strappy pumps winning the war against neatly stacked rows of subdued Italian leather. A yellow umbrella printed with cartoon elephants, defiantly sticking out of an umbrella stand that otherwise contained only monochrome black and white ones.

Then the dishes in the kitchen started disappearing.

"What happened to the old teacups?" the Reaper asked, as his son offered him tea in new and unfamiliar dishware.

"Oh. Those." Kid's tone of voice was more dismissive than apologetic. "Mmm. Patti broke one. So then there were only seven left. Seven's a bad number. So we had to get rid of all of the rest of them. They were good for target practice. Did you know that Liz can hit a teacup from over eighty yards away?"

"I thought that you were the one controlling their aim."

"Not always, actually."

"Hmmmm." The Reaper found this very curious. And fascinating. There was still much about his son's chosen partners that he did not understand. There was much about demon-guns _period _that nobody seemed to really understand, not even Dr. Stein, who had shown up with a scalpel in his hand and a hungry look in his eyes the moment that the rumors about Kid finally choosing his partners had started circulating. The Reaper had sent Stein away with a chop to the head and a stern reprimand. He privately wondered if that would always be enough, though.

The Reaper also wondered how well his son was adjusting to life in the same house with two wild, chaotic young women. He worried, of course. He couldn't help it. He was a father.

And the house kept changing.

Stacks of fashion magazines on the endtables. Black and white candles being replaced by red and pink and green, the type that came with fruity or evergreen scents. Sometimes the furniture in a room wholly re-arranged, or carpet or wallpaper completely replaced. Music that _wasn't _fifty years old piling up beside the phonogram. Spaces that had been wide, cold, and sterile slowly began to grow cluttered, close, and warm.

Every time the Reaper dropped in for a visit, something else had changed.

"We're remodeling the east wing bathroom again," Kid had said once, "Just because." Letting Patricia rest her head on his shoulder and laugh as she watched the Reaper's enormous hands fumble with a tiny teacup. Or: "I replaced the chandelier in the lower ballroom because it was ugly. I hope you weren't too attached to it." Kid said this as Elizabeth sighed and rolled her eyes, retorting, "You didn't think that it was ugly until two weeks ago."

"Yes. But. That was because I'd never bothered to count all of the crystals before." Kid glared at his father. "Did you _know _that there was an uneven number on both sides of each rung?"

"Kid, why were you counting the crystals on the chandelier?" The Reaper had asked this, even though he had known that it was a futile question. It was still his duty as a father to ask, after all.

"Because," Kid said, suddenly and quite obviously uncomfortable. "Because I had to. I had to make sure." And he had left it at that.

The more things changed, the Reaper thought, the more they stayed the same.

The kids got older. And then they weren't exactly kids anymore.

"Sorry about the mess," Kid said, pausing to shoot a deadly glare at a small, neat stack of storage boxes that hardly counted as a _mess _by any standard. "Liz is remodeling one of the guest rooms again. You know. Because she does that."

"Can I see?" the Reaper asked, his curiosity piqued.

"No you cannot see," Liz said, striding into the room impatiently, clutching a book of wallpaper samples to her chest. "It's still a work in progress. Genius which must not be seen or judged until it is complete!"

"Understood." Kid flopped down onto a couch, grinning at her. He was clearly no longer the sole master of this house, and strangely enough to the Reaper's eyes, he actually seemed somewhat more relaxed because of it. Kid then turned to his father and whispered loudly, "This is one of her _art _things. She just has to get it out of her system."

"Like you when you started re-organizing the kitchen drawers at three in the morning last night?" Liz snapped back at him. "Just getting something out of your system?"

Kid's face darkened. "_Liz_," he hissed.

"Did you really do that?" the Reaper asked.

"I had to," Kid mumbled, miserably, refusing to meet his father's eyes. "Some of the spoons were misplaced."

The Reaper loomed over his son. "You can leave the spoons. I really don't mind."

"Well, _I _mind."

"Kid, this is still my house--"

"No, it isn't."

Of course that was the truth. But Kid still managed to point out the truth in the snottiest, most insufferable way possible. It was a trait of Kid's which, fortunately, the Reaper still found utterly adorable.

Eventually, the Reaper started dropping by less and less frequently. For one thing, his son was growing up. For another thing, the Reaper sensed that Kid and the girls had reached the point where they were starting to want actual privacy, especially privacy from nosy parental figures. Or nosy gods. But the biggest reason that the Reaper stopped checking in so often was that he was worrying less.

The more chaotic the house got – the more clutter, the more disorganization, the more signs that it was actually being lived in – the less that the Reaper worried.

The house was a mirror that reflected the hearts of its masters. When Kid had taken charge of it, still young and alone, it hadn't taken long for the house to be transformed into a nearly completely blank slate. All of the Reaper's own quirk and clutter, swiftly cleaned out and eliminated, replaced by regimented organization, minimalist efficiency, and a deeply unsettling monochrome symmetry. A mirror reflecting an empty heart. The boy had had nothing to show for himself, other than the drive to cleanse and compartmentalize. _Balance, _he had said, repeating the words that his father had taught him, but not understanding any of them. _The house is balanced now, _he'd said, proudly showing off his even candles, his precisely aligned picture frames, his clean empty spaces to his father.

And the Reaper had worried, because nothing in that house had been balanced at all. Balance meant having both order and chaos. Kid abhorred chaos and disorder, which meant that he didn't truly understand balance. Or at least, he hadn't understood at the time. He'd merely parroted his father's words and had gone about sometimes doing as he was told, sometimes not. Beating himself up over every failure, large or small, real or imagined. Unable to accept even the slightest imperfection, whether in himself, in the house, or in the world around him. Driving himself relentlessly through an utterly _un_balanced life.

That was no way to run a life. Certainly no way to run a household. And definitely no way to run a world.

But the girls had changed all of that. Slowly, of course. Kid was nothing if not stubborn, a creature of habit – or rather, a creature of habits so deeply ingrained that they became obsessions. And he fought and fought and fought, a thousand tiny wars over shelf space and furniture arrangement, over kitchen organization or wall decorations, over the shoes in the front hall and the umbrellas and the nail polish bottles and the candles. These battle lines were drawn and decided behind the scenes, of course. Never in front of the Reaper's eyes. But he could always see the results.

The magazines kept piling up on the end tables, eventually joined by children's books of animal pictures, and trashy-looking romance novels with half-naked cowboys on the covers. And then mixed in among these began to appear the well-thumbed and well-loved palindrome collections, and the field guides to wild butterflies. Clutter that most definitely did _not _belong to the girls. But still clutter.

Not all of the mens' shoes in the shoe cubby were matching shades of black anymore.

More dishes were broken, and then not replaced. Sometimes the sets were just left incomplete. Because seven matching bowls could be enough. Or five cups. Or ten spoons. The rule of eight slowly loosened its previously iron grasp on the kitchen drawers and cupboards.

The Reaper worried less and less. And subsequently visited less and less.

Not that there was no longer any cause to worry, just reason to worry _less. _But there were still worrisome things. One time Patricia greeted him by touching his arm and saying, "Not today. Today's a bad time."

"Why?"

"Because last night was a bad night." Her round, cheerful face pinched and drawn with a very adult-like weariness. "He was matching. The shoes. Over and over again."

"I don't think he's ever done that before."

"Yeah. It's… a new one."

Sometimes they got _new ones. _Sometimes the old ones went away without being replaced by new ones, at least not for a while. There were always some times that were better than others. These things tended to go in cycles. One day the Reaper would discover that all of the more colorful, unevenly burned candles in the house had suddenly been replaced with rigidly measured and evenly-shaved sticks of black and white. Then, months later, the insidiously colorful candles would be back, slowly encroaching until they took over. The cacophony of colors and scents would remain untouched until Kid needed to get something out of his system. Again.

But that was all right, because _that _was balance.

Not like it had been before, when the boy had been alone. Now things were different. Now he had real balance.

"Don't touch that," Kid said, swatting his father's enormous hand away from the newest framed decoration hanging on one of their walls. "I just managed to finally get it level."

This one was a photograph, not a painting. Seven smiling faces, snow, trees, and the gaudiest golden monstrosity that the Reaper had ever seen in the background. "Is that from Kyoto?" he asked.

"Yes. That's the Golden Pavilion."

"You all look like tourists," the Reaper said, amused at the photograph. "Was it really that fun?"

"Absolutely not. One of our worst missions ever, quite frankly. Even worse than that wasp-monster guy in Bogotá."

"This was worse?"

"_Tentacles._ I hate Japan."

"But you kept this photograph."

"Well, this part was fun. I liked the temple. It was more-or-less symmetrical." Then he was giving the Reaper a careful look. "Have you ever heard of Hayashi Yoken?"

"Nope. Nuh-uh."

"He's the monk who burned down the Golden Pavilion in 1950. Because he loved the building so much, and was so obsessed with its beauty, that… Well, he burned it down. I suppose." He frowned. "Maka read a book about it. She was telling me about it, but… I don't know. I really don't understand the thought process that would lead to something like that. I mean, the obsession part, sure, I understand that," he said, without even a hint of chagrin or embarrassment in his voice. "But why would anybody want to destroy something that they loved?"

"Humans have strange hearts," the Reaper said. He looked down at his son. "Kid. I'm happy to hear you say that you don't understand the thought process behind something like that. You don't have to. It's probably best that you don't."

Kid scratched at his ear. First the right one, then the left one. "I mean, the whole Louvre thing. You _know _that was an accident, right?" Asking for validation for the umpteenth million time.

"I know. Everybody knows," the Reaper said.

"No. Not everybody 'knows.' I still hear rumors sometimes…" Scratching at his ears _and _tapping his toes against the ground, now. Tic-ing. "It's not fair. Maka can destroy all of the gates at Fushimi Inari with one badly-timed Demon Hunter, and everybody knows that it's an accident. Black Star can demolish half of Machu Picchu and everybody still says that it's an accident. Then Liz and Patti and I cause one tiny little explosion at the Louvre – and not even near any of the _important _stuff, mind you, just beneath that hideous glass pyramid thing – and then everybody assumes that I burnt down the museum on _purpose_. Because of people like Hayashi Yoken. It's like, every time I set something on fire, people think it's because I'm some sort of psychopath!"

The Reaper risked patting his son on the shoulder. "There, there," he said. "You're not a psychopath. You just have lousy aim. Besides," he added cheerfully, "that's why we know so many great lawyers!"

Kid turned and glared at his father.

The Reaper silently decided to wait a good long time before his next attempt to visit his very, very difficult son. Being a father was hard_. _Being a god was so much easier. A god didn't have to worry about what to say to a son who both resented the whispered rumors that swirled about him and at the same time deeply feared that they may be at least partly true. That was a father's job. But the Reaper had never been much good at being a father. He was good at worrying about his son, but not very good at figuring out what to do about those worries.

Kid had a funny way of making his father always feel unbalanced.

Kid's toes finally stopped their nervous tapping, which meant that his brain had already dropped the subject and moved on. "So, anyway," he said. "Liz and I were talking. We're going to remodel the kitchen."

"Why?"

"Eh. After Japan, I think we both have something that we need to get out of our systems. I'm not going to let her get away with marble countertops, though. That woman is insane."

And so they went, changing and reshaping the house to their whims, often to the tune of a rhyme and reason that the Reaper couldn't possibly fathom. Humans had strange hearts. And so did his son, who was not human. In combination, the three of them somehow managed to become the strangest of all of the many strange things that the Reaper had seen in his long, long life.

But at least they were balanced.

And so he didn't have to worry about them so much, not anymore.


	2. Who You Gonna Call?

**The Devil's in the Details**

four short stories about one old house, for 42_souls

**Part Two: Closure**

**(who you gonna call?)**

* * *

"Do something do something _do something_!" Liz cowered and clutched at her hair dramatically. "_Hurry!"_

"I'm trying!" Kid dove inelegantly after his prey, but it eluded his grasp again. He smashed into the floor, swore colorfully, and got up again, running hard.

"It's okay, it's okay!" Patti comforted her sister by patting her on the back. "We're safe in here, okay? Patti will protect you!"

"Patti that is a _ghost _and a pillow fort isn't going to do any good against--"

"INCOMING!"

Patti barely had time to duck before the ghost screamed through the air right where her head had been. A moment later, Kid followed on the back of Beelzebub. He managed to avoid the top of the pillow fort, by a narrow margin. But then a failed mid-air lunge for the blue light of the elusive ghost resulted in him crashing spectacularly into a wall of carefully-arranged paintings. Glass shattered, frames snapped, canvases crashed to the ground, and Kid zoomed after the ghost again.

"Dammit dammit dammit dammit!" Liz cowered beneath the pile of pillows that Patti had so thoughtfully assembled. Then she raised her head enough to shout, "Dammit, Kid, you specifically promised me that there wouldn't be any _ghosts _in your creepy old house!"

"Well, there aren't supposed to be," Kid admitted, narrowly managing to avoid crashing Beelzebub into a fireplace, "But sometimes--"

He crashed into a curtain, swore colorfully again, and thrashed around violently. The curtain rod pulled loose and clanged to the floor. Kid's swearing was immediately muffled by an enormous, tangled pile of black velvet.

The ghost finally slowed down its mad race around the room, the stopped altogether. It floated languidly above the downed curtains, gazing at the sight below and lickings its paws in a smug, self-satisfied way. It was just a cat, with a small and not-very-bright soul. But even a small wandering soul was enough to cause Patti's sister to have a complete freakout. Patti sighed, figured that it was time to take matters into her own hands, and started to climb out of the pillow fort.

Liz grabbed at Patti's ankle immediately. "Don't leave me!" she hissed.

Patti shook off her sister's grasp and laughed at how stupid Liz was being. Then she moved across the room slowly, approaching the ghost with caution. "Here, kitty kitty," she whispered. "Kitty-cat, kitty-cat. Here, kitty kitty! Meow meow!"

The ghostly cat's eyes immediately fixated on Patti. It twitched, and Patti sensed that it was about to start running again. "Meow, meeeeooooow!" she tried again. And the cat did not run. Instead, it stepped cautiously through the air toward Patti.

"Good girl! Good girl!" Patti wrapped her arms around the ghostly cat, cradling it near her chest. It purred contentedly, even as it whispered in an out of Patti's arms. Of course the poor thing was insubstantial. Patti could only really pretend to be holding it. But for the cat, that seemed good enough.

"Thank you, Patti," Kid said. He had finally managed to extract himself from the curtains, and was now standing up shakily. "I--" He froze, his eyes widening. Patti saw his face go white. She turned her head and saw what he was staring at: The wall of ruined paintings. The shattered glass, the broken frames, the torn canvases, and the blastmarks that Beelzebub had left on the formerly-pristine white wall. He was also staring at the couch, which had been stripped of all of its pillows and cushions, subsequently sacrificed to make Patti's pillow fort. Finally his gaze settled on the pillow fort itself, marring the floor plan of the room like an asymmetrical blight. Liz cowered behind the pile of cushions and stared at the ghost in Patti's arms with wide, frightened eyes.

Kid's right eyebrow started twitching in a funny way.

"Close your eyes," Patti told him. He did. He not only closed them, but also covered them dramatically with his hands. Patti cradled the ghostly form of the dead cat in her arms and said, "Now tell me what to do." The cat had a pure soul and wasn't fit for eating, but Patti knew that they had to do _something _to get rid of it.

"Okay. Um. Okay. Ghosts." Kid tapped his foot against the ground, in that tic-ish way that he sometimes did. It meant that he was struggling to wrest something approaching coherent thought from the obsessive loop that his brain was getting stuck in. "They only stick around if they have unfinished business. We can't take a ghost's soul to Father unless we give it closure first. I destroyed the curtains too, didn't I."

"But you promised me no ghosts!" Liz wailed in protest, still safe behind her wall of pillows. "Kid, you _promised _no ghosts in this house!"

"I _know, _I'm _sorry, _but it's a big old house and sometimes they just wander in here--"

"Sometimes?!" Liz shrieked. "This has happened _before?!"_

"Twice and _dammit _Liz do you have any idea how long it's going to take me to replace those paintings?! If it hadn't been for you screaming your head off, I wouldn't have had to--"

"Oh so this is MY fault now?! Whose genius idea was it to ride around on his flying skateboard _indoors_?!"

"If it weren't for you and your stupid phobias, none of this would have happened! Why don't you go see a therapist or something and get _over _yourself?"

"A therapist? _Really?! _You're telling me that _I _need a therapist? _You?!_"

Patti sat down on the floor, still cradling the cat's spirit in her arms, ignoring them both. Kid and her sister were making a hilarious scene, both screaming at each other while one stood with his hands clamped over his eyes and the other cowered behind a wall of pillows. In any other situation, Patti would have laughed at them. But she had a soul to take care of.

Patti cradled the cat in her lap, gently running her fingers through its intangible fur. The cat purred luxuriously, then slowly rolled over in Patti's arms, exposing its glowing belly. Patti laughed at the sight of the dead cat begging for a belly-rub. Was that really all that it would take? Was _that _what counted a "closure" for a simple-minded animal? Patti pretended to rub the ghost's belly. She watched as the cat-like form of the ghost slowly faded away, until nothing was left but the healthy, blue glow of a deceased soul ready to move on.

Patti bounced the soul around in her hands cheerfully. She couldn't see the souls of living beings, not like Kid and Maka could. But everybody could see the souls of the deceased. And they were nice and solid too, not like the insubstantial bodies of ghosts. Patti stood up, then the tossed the cat's soul over toward Kid. "Here you go. All done!"

"What?" Kid lifted his hands off his face and opened his eyes, but not in time to prevent himself from being smacked in the face by the flying soul. "Patti!"

"Sorry, sorry!" Patti laughed at the way that Kid was bending down to pick the soul off the floor, squinting in a funny way that meant that he was still trying to avoid seeing the destruction in the room around him.

"Is it over?" Liz asked, tentatively crawling out from behind the pillow fort. Then she saw the impending disaster that was Kid turning his head to get a better look at the curtains that he had destroyed. She rushed immediately to his side. "Um, um, Patti's right, you should probably close your eyes--" She clamped her hands over his eyes and began steering him out of the room. "Let's go, uh, let's go deliver that soul to his Reaperness right now!" She turned her head and hissed at Patti, "Clean up as much of this as you can before we get back."

Patti pouted. "No fair!" But of course, Liz and Kid were already gone.

Patti sighed and began disassembling her totally awesome pillow fort, returning the cushions and pillows to where they belonged. Personally, Patti thought that the pillow fort had been a vast improvement over the previous arrangement of the room. But Patti complied with her sister's request and started "fixing" the room anyway. Now her sister and Kid _both _owed her big-time.


	3. Seriously Soylent Green

**The Devil's in the Details**

four short stories about one old house, for 42_souls

**Part Three: Effort**

**(seriously soylent green)**

* * *

They didn't have an oven timer. And they never bothered to use a clock. They didn't need to – they had something better.

"Any minute now," Kid said, up to his elbows in suds as he scrubbed at the bowls in the sink. He was most pointedly not looking at any of the clocks in the kitchen.

"Are you sure? What if he's late?" Liz bent over and peered inside the oven. The cookies looked very, very close to done. In a few more minutes, they would be crossing the line from browned to burnt.

"He's never late," Kid said. "He always shows up exactly when--"

"_YO YO HELLO! WASSUP WASSUP WASSUP?!_"

Technically the front hallway was quite a distance from the kitchen, but the Reaper's voice carried so strongly that he might as well have been in the room with them. "Right on time," Liz said, pulling on her oven mitts and opening the oven. "That's never going to stop being weird."

Patti popped her head into the kitchen. "Your dad's here," she told Kid.

"Oh, we heard him."

Patti was still blocking the kitchen entrance when the looming shadow of the Grim Reaper tried to squeeze his way in. "Are you baking _cookies_?" the Reaper asked, utterly unconvincing in his faked surprise.

"They need ten minutes to cool," Liz said, in her somewhat tired, _you-know-the-drill _voice. She handed the cookie sheets off to Kid, who set about scraping off the cookies and carefully arranging them on top of the wax paper covering their counters. "And yes, we made extras," she added. They always made extras, because this always happened.

Technically, this was still the Reaper's house, even if the busybody death god himself very rarely set foot inside of it. (Assuming that he even had feet. This was one of many things that Liz wasn't entirely certain about.) However, there was one situation, and one situation only, in which the Reaper reliably showed up on the front stoop of his own home. That was when there were cookies being baked.

Liz wasn't even sure that the Reaper could _eat _cookies – or anything, for that matter – but he always managed to show up and steal some at precisely the right moment when they were finished baking. Over the years Liz hadn't yet been able to figure out what he did with the cookies, or where precisely they _went _after he managed to get his enormous hands on some. She wasn't sure that she wanted to know.

Normally the Reaper would retreat and wait the usual ten minutes before making a pass at the cookies. But this time, for some reason, he seemed determined to invade the kitchen right away. "Kid, Kid," he said, attempting to push his way past Patti, "We need to--"

"Hey _asshole, _they said to wait ten minutes!" Patti snarled, smacking at the Reaper's robes. "Where are your fucking manners?!"

Liz tried not to laugh. If there was only one person on the face of the planet who could get away with calling God an asshole, it was her sister.

"Patti," Kid said, disapprovingly. "Don't say 'fuck.'"

"But he's going to steal our fucking cookies!"

"I swear I'm not going to steal any cookies," the Reaper said. "But," he explained, using his mindboggling hands to pull a stack of paper folders from wherever he had been keeping them, "we have official business to discuss. So please let me in the kitchen? Pretty pretty please?"

Patti pressed her finger to her lips, and frowned, apparently weighing the merits of the Reaper's cover story. Finally, however, her frown melted away, and she gave the Reaper her cutest smile. "Oh, okay!" She laughed. "Sorry about that." She stepped aside and let the Reaper flow past her. "Just don't touch Patti's cookies!"

"Okey-dokey," the Reaper promised, "I won't."

"Okey-dokey!" Patti echoed. Then she laughed again.

The Reaper sat himself down at the small table at the back of the kitchen. Liz reached over, forcibly yanked the spatula out of Kid's hand, and hissed at him, "Your father's here. Stop ignoring him."

"Liz, let me divide up the cookies evenly. You know this is important."

"Uh-huh. I do know. And by the way, _I _can do it."

He frowned at her. "You know which batch is which?"

"It's kind of hard not to," she said, already scraping the last of the cookies off the last cookie sheet. Normally Kid was an expert at projecting earth-shattering importance upon trivial matters, but in the case of the cookies, he was – for once – actually rightabout how important their precise division into specific shares would be. Sitting in the soap-filled sink were still three mixing bowls, for three different batches of cookies. All three batches had white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts. But in two of the batches, chopped-up souls of the damned had been added to the batter. The cookies resulting from those two batches had taken on a somewhat sinister blood-colored tint. But they smelled wonderful.

Kid had divided everything up precisely: four chips and four nuts in each cookie. Eight souls divided into four, precisely diced up, and then added to separate mixing bowls. Separate batches of cookies for Liz and Patti, baked on two separate cookie sheets, to ensure that they didn't mix the remains of any of the souls. Cookies of the Condemned, as Liz had jokingly called it the first time that Kid had whipped up this particular baking trick.

The Reaper was spreading out his folders all over their kitchen table. "Kid, get over here. We need to--"

"I'm coming," Kid said. Then, unfortunately, he caught sight of the sink out of the corner of his eye. There were still the three mixing bowls that he hadn't finished cleaning yet. "In a minute," he said, marching purposefully, yet helplessly, back toward the kitchen sink.

Liz glared at the back of Kid's head. Of course, to him, the compulsion to clean would be more important than not being rude to his own father. Of course.

"My my my my my," the Reaper said. Liz couldn't tell from his tone of voice what exactly he meant by that. And the Reaper's face, of course, was its usual unreadable mask.

Liz finished scraping off the last of the cookies, making sure that her batch and Patti's batch were cooling on separate sheets of wax paper. As long as she and her sister consumed a soul in its entirety, it still counted toward their numerical accumulation; and it didn't matter, actually, if said whole souls were chopped up and baked into cookies, as long as every bit of them was eaten eventually. But keeping the two cookie batches and their respective souls _separate _was important. Mixing bits and pieces of different souls between the two batches would only screw up their all-important total soul count, and quite possibly cause Kid's head to explode.

It was uncanny, how perfectly round and even the finished cookies were. Of course Kid had precisely measured and shaped each little blob of batter before slipping the cookie sheets into the oven. He actually kept rulers and compasses in the kitchen drawers, specifically for that purpose. He measured and shaped each blob of cookie batter individually, trimming their edges with clean sweeps of a sharp-edged compass. Now, science and common sense would seem to dictate that during the baking process, imperfections would inevitably surface; an uneven edge here, a bit of a bubble there, _something. _But nothing of the sort ever happened, not in Kid's kitchen. The cookies came out of the oven just as perfectly-shaped as they had been when they went in. It was as if by sheer force of will, Kid could prevent the laws of baking physics from interfering with his symmetry. Liz figured that this was perhaps the universe's way of taking pity on Kid, sparing him one and only one step in his insane baking ritual.

"You're baking with the souls of the damned again?" the Reaper asked, having apparently noticed the blood-colored cookies.

"When you put it that way, it sounds kind of sinister," Liz said. She casually slipped the empty cookie sheets onto a high shelf, where Kid likely wouldn't see them until they had cooled down enough for him to start scrubbing with a brillo pad. The last thing that she needed was for the idiot to burn his hands again. "But Kid also made some normal cookies especially just for you."

"That's because my son is so _thoughtful!_ Doesn't that make him just adorable?!"

Liz briefly wondered what would happen if she just answered _no _to that. But it was late in the evening, and she was too tired to pick a fight with God. So instead she nodded, removed her oven mitts, and sat down at the table beside her sister.

"So how come you always know when we're baking cookies?" Patti asked the Reaper. "Is that one of your powers? Do you have a cookie-radar?" Patti turned her head squinted at Kid. "Do _you _have a cookie-radar?"

"I'm fairly certain that I do not." Kid answered without turning to look at her; he was still intensely absorbed in the task of scrubbing the mixing bowls spotless.

So Patti immediately bounced to another topic. "What's this?" She picked up one of the folders on the table and opened it. "Ooooooooh. One-stars!"

Liz looked over her sister's shoulder, and studied the photographs of the first-year Shibusen students pasted on the inside. "These are the one-star students' team applications?"

"Yup. It's that time of the year again." The Reaper opened more folders, spreading them across the table. "These are the three-person teams that the students themselves chose. I would be very, very interested in hearing your thoughts about these… combinations."

"Because of what happened last year?" Patti asked, blunt as ever.

"Uh-huh. Because of what happened last year."

"I _warned _you," Kid said, finally joining them at the table, seeing as how he had finally finished making the dishes spotless. He sat down across from Liz and Patti, and began re-arranging the folders strewn across the table into neat rows and columns. "If this is about what happened with Betty and Meiying, then I _so _warned you. I warned Mr. Sid, I warned _you_, and I--"

"Eventually," Liz interrupted him, "your right to keep saying 'I-told-you-so' is going to expire. Now would be a good time, in fact."

"But you agreed with me, remember?"

"I remember. It's just not something that I'm happy to have been right about." She twisted a strand of hair around her finger absent-mindedly. "I mean, seriously. I didn't need soul perception ability to see that those two loathed each other. And Mr. Sid was all like, 'Oh no, they get along so well, they're always together with that boy, they'll make a great team,' and I was like, no _duh _they're always both hanging around with that dumbass Fritz kid, it's because they both like him, except that he's totally gay or whatever but they were both too dumb to pick up on that. And then the two of them started fighting all the time, but it was all girl-fighting, like this total black hole of passive-aggressiveness, and all of your guy teachers were still too clueless to figure out that they _were _fighting, and somehow they still both managed to resonate with Fritz so on the surface it looked like the team was all right, but--"

"But I told you they were building toward to duel," Kid said, staring straight at his father. "I told you. Even Black Star could see that. _Black Star._ Remember when you told them to fight us as an extra lesson? Even Black Star was picking up on the bad vibes from that team. He told me that those girls were going to kill each other. Even if they were doing the weird girl-thing where they pretended to be friends but actually wanted to kill each other."

"Then they went _boom_!" Patti said, pounding the table for emphasis. "I remember! We all watched them! That was the best duel _ever_!"

"Except that they destroyed half the school."

"And I _told _you," Kid said again. "Betty's partner was a cannon and Meiying's partner was a catapult. Recipe. For. Disaster. Oh, and before my rights to say this expire permanently: I told you so."

"You did, you did," the Reaper admitted. "I admit, letting those girls stay on Fritz's team was a gamble. Their resonance with _him _was so powerful that I had hoped…" The Reaper trailed off, then shrugged cheerfully. "Oh well! What's done is done. Now we just need to make sure that something like that doesn't happen again." He pushed one of the files toward Kid. "I know that you haven't met all of these new students yet, but--"

"But you want me to see if there are any more Betties or Meiyings applying to be on the same team." Kid impatiently pushed the offered folder back to the precise spot in the middle of a row where it had previously been. But he opened it up and stared at the photographs inside anyway. "I don't even know half of these people."

"But Patti and I do," Liz said, flipping open the folder nearest to her. "We chaperoned most of these kids at summer camp." She had to force herself not to frown at the memory. Having achieved the rank of Death Scythe meant not so much sexy new powers as it did increased responsibilities. She and Patti had been among several senior students who had ended up helping the teaching staff chaperone the younger one-star teams during Shibusen's summer wilderness camp program. The two-week program had ultimately been declared a qualified success, with only a few serious injuries and one minor arson incident tallied up in the end. Liz, however, had been severely reprimanded for not actually teaching her group of students how to complete one of the survival exercises. Instead of teaching her students how to build a raft and navigate a river, she had instead taught them how to hotwire a pickup truck that some redneck fisherman had conveniently left parked near their campsite. They had driven themselves t o the checkpoint where Mr. Sid had been waiting for them.

"They have _fwaaaaaaa! _resonance," Patti said, pointing to the folder that Liz was holding. Then, apparently feeling that she needed to translate for the Reaper's benefit, she added, "That's good."

Kid was studying another folder by then. "What, they want to have a bow technician, a slingshot technician, and a boomerang technician on the same team?" He frowned. "Bad idea. Aren't you teaching these kids to remember to balance projectile weapons with bladed weapons? You can't have three projectile weapons on the same team. Frankly, you shouldn't even have two. That was how Black Star and I were able to take down Fritz's team. Having two projectile technicians left the third technician vulnerable in close-range combat. Well, that, and the fact that two out of three members of the team wanted to kill each other." He handed the folder to Liz. "Do you know these kids?"

"Yeah. They were in Tsubaki's group at camp. I think all three of the technicians have known each other since waaaaaaay back. They looked like they worked well as a team, but…" She shrugged. "It's not like I've been able to see them in actual combat. Just camp exercises. And you're right, there's nobody on that team who can do close-range combat."

"So they're going to get themselves killed," Kid declared, "unless we break up the team and order them to join up with some others."

"Caitlin," Liz said, pointing to the photograph of one of the technicians in the folder, "did all right teaming up with Gabriel and Vinita at camp."

"Where's Gabriel's folder?"

"Somewhere over here…"

"Oh. Perfect." He opened the folder and drummed his fingers against the table surface. "Suppose we switched Ann and Lucas out of Gabriel's team and replaced them with what's-her-name."

"Caitlin. And Lacey. Her partner is Lacey." Liz closed the folder in her hands. "Honestly I don't think that anybody will be too upset about that. They all kind of seem to get along well enough. I mean, they got along well during camp. Which is a good sign, I suppose. Usually living in tents and pissing in the woods for two weeks is the type of situation that draws out the ugliness between people. But that didn't really happen to anybody in this group," she said, indicated several of the folders with her hands, "so yeah, I think they get along all right. We should be able to shuffle the teams around without causing any major drama." Suddenly she turned to the Reaper. "Oh, no way. Was _this _the point of condemning us to camp for two weeks? So that we'd be able to do all of this team-shuffling stuff?!"

"Maaaaaaaaybe," the Reaper said. "Well, the point certainly wasn't to teach the students how to steal cars!"

Patti laughed heartily at that one, although Liz rankled silently. Now she could see where Kid got his talent for backhanded insults from. "You're some sort of evil mastermind, you know that?" she told him. Then she scratched her head and mumbled, "Wait, what am I saying? _We're _the ones making soylent green cookies over here."

"White chocolate chips and macadamia nuts, actually," Kid corrected her. Pedantic as always. "And you didn't make them. I did."

"I know. I know." Liz had to bite back an insult about how it had taken him three hours to do so in the first place. But that was just what happened whenever Kid got it into his head to cook. Even something simple like cookies would turn into a labor-intensive, three- or four-hour affair. He was obsessively perfectionist about every step in the process, even to the extent of making sure that exactly four chips and four nuts were baked into every single cookie, in a total of three batches of a dozen. And it wouldn't matter how many times Liz would tell him that neither she nor Patti _cared _about how many chips or how many nuts made it into each cookie. It didn't matter because _he _cared, and he couldn't stop caring about it.

On the other hand, however, Liz had to admit that there was probably no other person in the world who had the precision and organization necessary to pull off the impressive feat of being able to bake using souls of the damned as ingredients. Even worse, he was baking for two partners, not one. That meant dividing everything evenly, creating completely different batches of batter, making sure that bits and pieces of different souls never mixed…

But, to be fair, it was his fault that they had started cooking with their claimed souls in the first place. It was Kid's obsessive, relentless drive that had helped Liz and Patti achieve the rank of Death Scythe within the timeframe of a scant few years. But even after they'd scored their official ranking, Kid's obsession with their accumulative soul count hadn't ceased. He still had a preference for missions that yielded opportunities for mass killings, to take as many souls as possible in one strike. For his girls, he always said. To feed them. And to cleanse and balance the world; getting rid of as much corruption as he could, as quickly and efficiently as possible. He preferred not to individually hunt the damned, but to seek out their gatherings and massacre them together. Which was all well and good with Liz, but eventually she had grown tired of having to _eat _so many souls in one sitting. And it was after a particularly brutal battle that she had finally convinced Kid to take their hard-earned souls home and chop them up into a salad. Two salads, actually, as he was always careful about keeping Liz and Patti's shares separate. And then of course he had added jicama and chèvre to the salads, because Kid was a yuppie like that. A yuppie born and bred, as Liz secretly suspected all spoiled little gods must be.

"Uh-oh," Patti suddenly said. She handed a folder to Liz. "Uh-oh." She pointed to two of the photographs glued inside. "Big big big big uh-oh."

Kid flipped open a few more folders, glowering down at them. Liz could see the shadows forming under his eyes. She was tired, he was tired, they all were tired. Finally, Liz turned to the Reaper and said, "There's no way we can over all of these tonight. So when do you need them done by?"

"Soon. Soon."

"Fine. We can work with 'soon.'" Kid began gathering up the folders into neat stacks. "Want some cookies?"

"Don't mind if I do!"

The Reaper managed to grab most of the non-souled cookies as he flowed his way out of the kitchen. Liz and her sister followed him out, through the house and to the front hallway. "Are you gonna come back next time we make cookies?" Patti asked him.

"Maaaaaaaybe. We're a little bit busy busy busy right now, though."

"Patti's busy too. But not too busy for cookies. Kid worked hard on those so you'd _better _appreciate them." She wagged her finger at the Reaper sternly. "You didn't even say 'thank you.'"

"Sorry, sorry. You'll tell him 'thank you' for me, Patti, pretty please?" The Reaper offered his hand to Patti in an attempt to mollify her. "High five?"

She laughed and slapped at his enormous hand. "High-five!"

"Down low!"

"Back up!"

"Too slow!" Patti pulled her hand back at the last minute, and laughed as the Reaper missed.

"_Patti_," Liz hissed.

"You're right. That was mean. So-o-orry." She slapped at the Reaper's hand again. "Here you go."

"Thank you, Patricia!" The Reaper bounced cheerfully out the front door. "See you later, alligators!"

"After a while, crocodile!" Patti shouted after him. Then she closed the door, turned to her sister, and said, "It's funny because he's not really a crocodile."

"…I know, Patti. I get it."

"I like crocodiles. They're scary but they can't run very fast, so maybe not so scary, I think. Crocodiles go _graaaaaaaaar_. Like Patti's tummy when it's empty." Her smile melted into a terrifying scowl. "Where are _my _goddamn cookies?!"

"They're cool now, just take them," Kid said, finally emerging from the kitchen to join them.

"Yay, cookies!" Instantly reverted back to her sunshine-and-smiles mode, Patti skipped happily into the kitchen.

Kid watched her go, then rubbed at his temples wearily. "It's going to take us hours to sort through all of those team applications, isn't it?"

"Probably." Liz gazed in the general direction of the kitchen, where her sister had disappeared to. "Hey. So. Does it ever freak you out, like, how much on the same wavelength they are?"

" 'They' who?"

"You know. Patti. And your dad."

Kid laughed. "Are you serious?"

"You didn't see them high-fiving each other."

"All right. Maybe a little bit." He yawned. "I'm going to fall asleep on my feet if I don't get to bed soon."

Liz reached out and took his hand. "Me too. So let's go." She led him up the stairs. He really did look exhausted, and his shoulders slumped wearily as he walked. Liz figured that she should have felt concerned for him. But, on the other hand, she was used to watching Kid run himself into the ground, whether it was from baking cookies, or hunting the souls of the damned, or whatever. That was just the way that he _was_. He pushed himself into the point of collapse, every day. Then the next day he would roll out of bed and do the same thing again. And the tragic thing was that perhaps he didn't _have _to exhaust himself by turning the task of baking cookies into an intense three-hour-long ritual. Perhaps he didn't _have _to spend hours every day counting, fixing, re-arranging, and re-aligning everything in the house. Perhaps he didn't _have _to insist on only taking missions that resulted in long, difficult battles and massive kill counts. But of course, in his mind, he would never see it that way. He was both dedicated and damned to a life of perfection.

"You didn't have any cookies," Kid suddenly pointed out.

"I'm saving them for tomorrow," Liz said. "You know, you're not supposed to eat right before going to sleep. It slows down your metabolism. Do you want me to end up with thunder-thighs like Tsubaki?"

"Oh, she is not fat. Just way more muscular than you. And that was catty. Very catty."

"Come off it. You know you love my inner bitch."

" 'Inner'?"

She laughed. "Touché."

Suddenly he froze in mid-step. "Wait a minute," he said. "Wait wait wait wait wait. What did you do with the cookie sheets?!"

She dropped his hand, and sighed. "You can clean them in the morning."

"No, I'm going to wash them _now. _Just tell me where you hid them. You know I can't sleep until--"

"I know, I know, fine, whatever. They're on the shelf above the microwave." He turned and started running back down the steps, and she shouted after him, "You should thank me! You would have burned your hands again if I hadn't hid them from you."

"I wasn't going to--"

"Yes you _were _because you always _do_!" She pulled at her hair, exasperated and more than a little bit furious at him. "You know, you don't have to do this. Any of this! You don't have to scrub the cookie sheets tonight, you don't have to spend three hours baking the stupid cookies in the first place, you don't have to--"

"But I like cooking for you," he said. He paused at the bottom of the stairs, turned around, and looked back up at her. "All right?"

Liz felt her anger dissolve the moment that she saw the look in his eyes. She shook her head, momentarily defeated. "All right," she said. "But if you like it so much, then why do you let your dad get away with stealing all of the regular cookies and never leaving any for you?"

He tapped his chin, considering the question. Then he answered, "Because that's how it balances."

Liz bit her lip and swallowed her instinct to make an impatient retort. _Balance. _Of course. That's what it always came down to. And for once, she actually understood what he meant by it. He almost never said _I love you, _not to anyone. He was too much of a dick for that. But he would still spend hours in the kitchen making mango-chutney-and-damned-soul crepes for his partners, or giving Liz an obsessively perfectionist pedicure, or re-arranging Patti's sock drawers so that she would stop mismatching them, or making an extra dozen cookies just because he knew that his father would inevitably show up and try to steal some. That was how he balanced himself against his loved ones. He always demanded so much from Liz and her sister – he _needed _so much from Liz and her sister – but in return, he devoted himself to them with the same relentless, obsessive drive that dictated everything in his life.

Liz started back down the stairs toward him. "At least let me help you wash the cookie sheets," she said.

"No." He held up one hand, stopping her. "You'll do it wrong. You always scrub too hard and scrape up the surfaces."

She flipped her hair over her shoulder impatiently. "I don't understand how you can do something as nice as baking cookies for us, and still manage to be a complete dickhead about it."

"Come off it. You know you love my inner dickhead."

" 'Inner'?"

"Touché."


	4. But the Kids are All Right

**The Devil's in the Details**

four short stories about one old house, for 42_souls

**Part Four: Cranky **

**(but the kids are all right)**

* * *

It was exactly 3:30 in the morning when the phone rang.

By the time that Kid had finished swearing, and had stumbled down the stairs, into the lower foyer where the only phone in the house was kept, it was 3: 33 a.m. During three minutes, the phone had not stopped ringing. That meant that there was an emergency. Or at least, there had _better _have been an emergency. Kid picked up the phone, and tried not to grimace. His wrists were sore. "What now?"

"Um," said a very small, timid voice on the other end of the line. "Ummmm…."

"Who is this?" Kid asked.

"Marty. Th-This is Marty. Um, hi."

"…Who?"

"Marty Feldmann."

"_Who?_"

"I was in Miss Liz's group at camp--"

"Oh, no. Are you a Shibusen student?"

"Y-Yes, I--"

"How did you get this number?" Then Kid remembered that it was past three in the morning. It was currently 3:35, to be exact. "And why are you calling me?"

"Okay. Um." On the other end of the line, Marty took a deep breath. Then he said, "Please don't get angry. Mr. Sid gave me your phone number. He told me to call you."

Kid tried to balance his own foul mood – he did _not _appreciate being roused from a rather exhausted slumber – against his growing concern. The fact that some poor little one-star technician was calling him in the middle of the night probably meant that something was very, very wrong. "Marty, is this an emergency?" he asked. "If something's wrong, you need to tell me as quickly and as clearly as possible."

"I-I-I'm trying," Marty said. He sounded terrified. "It's just that… Um…"

Kid rolled his eyes, glad that Marty couldn't see what he was doing. "Marty. Take deep breaths. Calm down."

On the other end of the line, Marty did take deep breaths. Kid then heard footsteps, turned, and saw Liz and Patti standing there, watching him. "Is this an emergency?" Liz asked. "Should I be putting on some clothes?"

Kid covered the mouthpiece of the phone with his hand and whispered, "I don't know if it's an emergency."

"Who's calling?"

"Matt or… Something. No, wait. Marty."

"Marty Feldmann?" Liz combed through her mussed hair with her fingers absent-mindedly, frowning. "How'd he get this number?"

"From Sid, apparently."

"_What?_"

Patti laughed. "Oh, Marty! From camp!" Then she pointed at Kid. "You're not wearing any pants."

"I know. I know. Hold on a second." He uncovered the mouthpiece and addressed Marty again. "Talk to me. And do try to be articulate."

"Okay." There was a nervous tremble in Marty's voice, but he continued speaking nevertheless. "So like, I'm the leader of my team now. And, um, Mr. Sid is our advisor this semester. And, um. Ummmmm. We've been assigned to do an extracurricular lesson. So we need to--"

"Marty. _Marty._" Kid forced himself to swallow his rage. "You did _not _just call my home at three in the morning to ask for help with your homework, did you?"

"Not exactly."

"Then what IS the problem?! Hurry up and say it!"

"Don't scare him," Liz said, rather loudly, stepping toward Kid. "He's just a student. Stop yelling at him."

Kid held up a finger to silence her. She held up a different finger to show him what she thought of that. Patti laughed at them both. On the other end of the line, Marty continued with his infuriating dithering. "My team is supposed to retrieve a very specific object and bring it back to Mr. Sid. Who's like, at Shibusen right now. On the front steps. Waiting."

"Marty, what part of this is an 'emergency,' again?" Kid was well past the point of impatient. Marty's verbal spewage was an all-over-the-place mess. If only the idiot boy would be able to communicate more directly and efficiently!

"Um. Uhhhhh… Um." Marty sounded quite frightened now. "Okay. This is the hard part. Okay. Okay, here we go." Another deep breath. "So like… It's about the thing that we have to get and take back to Mr. Sid."

"Which would be what, now?"

"The mask."

"What mask?" Kid rubbed at his eyes sleepily.

"Your mask."

"My what?" Kid scratched at his head. Then, something in his sleep-fuzzed brain finally clicked into gear. "My _what_?!"

"Your mask. The one that looks like a skull, but kind of… you know. Silly."

"It is_ not silly _and Marty are you being serious right now? Seriously? Being serious?" Kid felt as if some sort of mental rug had just been yanked out from beneath him. He didn't understand what Marty was talking about, he didn't understand why Marty was calling him in the middle of the night to tell him any of this, and he didn't know how to respond to Liz tapping him on the shoulder and impatiently mouthing _What? Whaaaat? _over and over again. Kid tried to wave her away, but she wouldn't leave. Obnoxious. So he tried to turn his attention back to Marty. "This had better not be a prank call," he said, his voice dark and threatening.

"It's not a prank. Um. Sir. We're supposed to get the mask from you and give it to Mr. Sid. Who's waiting for us. Right now. In front of the school."

"I'm not going to give my mask to you," Kid said. "That's stupid."

"Oh, we know. I mean, um. We're supposed to take it from you."

Kid yawned and rubbed at his eyes again. "Are you trying to tell me that you want to fight me for it? Is _that _your extracurricular assignment?" He frowned. "That's the second time that Sid has sent a bunch of tow-headed little one-stars after me as an extracurricular. I'm going to have to talk to--"

"Oh, we're really not looking forward to having to fight you," Marty said, quickly. "I mean, um. We know that we're totally outmatched. So we're trying to get this done without starting a fight. But. Um. Like, if it did come down to a fight, at least we'd have the element of surprise."

And once again, Kid felt that mental rug being yanked out from beneath his brain. "You have the… the what?"

"The element of surprise."

"Marty…" Kid sighed. "Marty, you just told me all about your assignment. You just _blew _your element of surprise."

"No, actually," Marty said. "No, we haven't."

Slowly, Kid lowered the phone away from his face. He turned toward Liz. "Does Marty have a cell phone?" he asked.

"That's a stupid question. Everybody has a cell phone."

"Not me."

"That's because you're weird." Liz suddenly looked up at the ceiling. "Do you hear footsteps?"

And then it hit Kid. Two, three, no – four soul wavelengths. Two technicians, and two weapons. Young. _In the house. _He shouted an obscenity and slammed the phone back down into its cradle. "Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!" he screamed, pulling at his hair. If he hadn't been half-asleep, and if he hadn't been distracted by the bizarreness of getting a phone call at three in the morning, and if he hadn't been focusing all of his attention on trying to follow Marty's rambling, incoherent speech, then he would have _noticed _them right away---!

"Liz, Patti! Upstairs, NOW!"

"Do we have intruders?" Patti asked. "Oops, Patti's naked."

"_Gun form! Then it won't matter!"_

Kid was already pounding up the stairs when he felt two sets of cold steel sliding into his hands. "No holsters _and _no pants," Liz commented. "You must be really ticked off." Then, a moment later: "So, mind telling us what's going on?"

"Sid is an asshole, and he sent Marty's team of one-stars to steal my mask as an extracurricular, and I think they already _did _that while I was busy talking to Marty the Mouth-Breathing Idiot on the phone!" He rounded a corner, pounded down a hallway, and ran into his own bedroom. He immediately noticed the open closet door, the open window, and the distinct lack of any soul wavelengths in the room. That was because the four that he had sensed earlier were already on the roof above. "Dammit dammit dammit!"

Kid started toward the window, but then felt Liz jump out of his hand. He instinctively dropped Patti just to even out the balance. "Oh, no you don't," Liz said, pulling him back into the room. "You are _not _going to climb out that window with guns in both of your hands. Or half-naked." She pushed him toward the closet. "Pants. Now. And holsters."

"Should we get dressed too?" Patti asked her sister.

"No time," Kid snapped, trying to pull on his pants and run toward the window at the same time. At least he was already wearing his pajama top. "Two of the technicians are already getting away!"

"Two?" Liz still wasn't changing back into her gun form. "Where's the third? Do you even know which one is Marty?"

"Look, I don't know these kids as well as you do, I can't tell--" He froze. "The third one's down below. Outside. With a weapon." He scowled. "What do they think they're--?"

Then the first explosion rocked the house, knocking all three of them off their feet.

Kid scrambled back into a standing position. He immediately started running back downstairs. "Liz, Patti!" he snapped, impatiently. Why weren't they _already _back in his hands?!

"Sorry, but I think it's time to get dressed," Liz shouted after him. "This is going to be one of those _things_, isn't it?"

"Fine, fine! Go ahead and put on some clothes!" Kid was halfway down the stairs by now. "I'll take care of whoever's--"

Another shock rippled through the house, and Kid's feet flew out from beneath him. He fell gracelessly down the last few stairs, swearing all the while. He realized belatedly that what he had thought was an explosion had in fact been more like a seismic tremor. Kid gripped the bottom of the staircase railing, pulled himself shakily back to his feet, and paused for a moment to actually look around.

The house was still dark and gloomy. There was a light on in the lower foyer, near the phone. It was the only light that Kid had turned on when he had first answered the phone's ringing. But everywhere else was cloaked in shadow. Kid forced himself to take a deep breath, trying to focus his soul perception ability. Then he took eight deep breaths. And then he found the two souls that he was looking for. _There. _Inside the house, now. Behind him.

He whirled around just as all of the lights turned on.

"Argh!" He hissed and covered his eyes, shocked not so much by the sudden brightness as by the horrific sights that the lights revealed. The house was in complete disarray. Knocked-over furniture, crooked picture frames, fallen candles scattered all over the place, and one spectacularly smashed vase. Whatever the source of the tremors had been, it had obviously been much stronger downstairs than what Kid had felt upstairs.

Kid felt his vision blurring, his stomach clenching with panic. _He had to fix things. _Had to set them _right. _This was his _home_, dammit, and he couldn't just leave the candles on the ground or the shattered porcelain vase scattered all over the place! If his own home was in chaos, then his brain was in chaos, then the whole damn universe was in chaos. He sank down to his knees, momentarily overwhelmed by the destruction all around him. Trembling from head to toe, he shakily reached toward a piece of the broken vase. If he could just---

_BOOM!_

A third tremor rippled through the house. That, more than anything, momentarily jolted Kid back to his senses. He leapt back to his feet, and ran toward the source of the noise. It was coming from somewhere in front of him. He ran about three more steps before he froze in horror again. He could see them now, illuminated clearly by the blazing overhead lights: A young girl, dressed from head to toe in black sweats, her long hair pulled back into a combat-ready bun. An enormous gadha in her hands. And the grand piano in the lower ballroom, smashed to bits.

The girl was trembling slightly, too. Her soul wavelength quivered with fear laced with adrenaline – pure, terrified nerves. But she still managed to glare at Kid defiantly. "I'm sorry," she said. "But we really need to pass this assignment."

"And who exactly are you?" Kid asked, for lack of anything better to say.

Instead of answering, the girl swung her gadha again, in one long, slow arc over her head. Kid could see her soul resonating with her weapon's soul, building up toward an explosion. She brought the gadha smashing down to the ground in front of her feet, and the entire house rocked with the impact. Then Kid remembered that he was standing directly beneath a chandelier. Fortunately, he managed to scramble out of the way a fraction of a second before nearly fifty pounds of Swiss crystal came smashing down to the ground.

"Are you trying to KILL me?!" Kid snapped at them both. Then his gaze was caught by the smashed chandelier, and he couldn't look away. "Look at what you've _done!" _He pulled at his hair, fighting back tears. "That chandelier was commissioned! From Switzerland! We'll never be able to replace it… There's no way to fix it now…" He sank to his knees again, not noticing or caring that he was kneeling in the broken glass. His eyes were mesmerized by the sight of a thousand asymmetrical shards of shattered crystal, scattered gleaming across the carpet. It was like staring at a train wreck and being unable to look away. No, worse – it was like staring into the dark heart of the abyss of a demon god's soul wavelength, everything broken and chaotic, no two pieces of glass matching, jagged edges of broken crystal defying any of his attempts to seek out their matching partners with his eyes. Kid helplessly ran his hands through the scattered glass, then gingerly picked up one bit of broken chandelier, and let his eyes fixate on the mess in front of him until he could find a piece that would match with the one he was holding. He stared, and stared, but couldn't find—

The gadha smashed into the side of his head, and for a moment, everything went black.

When Kid found his vision (and his senses) again, he was knocked to the ground, thankfully having been flung somewhat away from the mess of broken glass that was all that remained of the chandelier. He turned his head just in time to see the girl looming over him, gadha raised. "I thought it would be waaaaay more difficult than this, to take you out," she said, pulling back her arms, preparing to swing the gadha down into Kid's face. "But you--"

There was a flash of bright soul-light, and the gadha screamed, turning back into a boy even as his partner's arms continued to helplessly swing downward. It took the girl a moment to realize that she was no longer holding the base of her gadha, but rather, her partner's left foot; the rest of the boy slammed into to the ground beside Kid, wincing with pain. "Owwwww, that hurts!" the boy hissed.

The girl still didn't seem to understand what had happened. She blinked stupidly at her partner. "Ti, what are you doing?"

"Behind you!" the boy shouted. But it was too late. Several rounds of gunfire slammed into the girl's back before she finally went down. But down she did go, nearly falling all over Kid as she did so. Kid managed to scramble out of the way at the last minute. He stood up quickly, dodged Ti's attempt to grab at his ankle, and tried to get his bearings. The girl technician was down, but not out; her eyes looked wide and stunned, but she was already getting back on her feet. So was the weapon named Ti.

But Patti was now holding the ground in front of the smashed piano, using Liz to fire another shot that exploded against the technician's back. "_Serpentine, bitches!_" Patti shrieked. "_What did we teach you at camp?! SERPENTINE!"_

The girl finally did try to run, then. Patti fired at her again. Ti leapt directly into the path of the shot, and took three soul-bullets straight into his chest. "Ow! Ow! _Ow!_"

"Ti!" the girl screamed, somewhat melodramatically. Ti sank to his knees, clutching his chest and gasping. The girl flung herself over her partner, wrapped her arms around him, and begged Patti tearfully, "Don't shoot!"

Patti raised her gun and aimed, no mercy in her eyes. "Still not serpentining," she said.

"We surrender!" the girl shouted. "We give up! We surrender!"

And then, finally, Liz leapt out of Patti's hands. Patti looked disappointed, but she let her sister run toward Kid. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"No," Kid answered. "Absolutely not."

"Come here." Liz brushed a bit of broken glass off his shoulder. Then she raised her fist and punched him, hard, on the side of his face that hadn't been hit by the gadha. "Better now?"

"Much. Thank you." Kid could finally focus his thoughts again, now that he had matching dull aches on both sides of his face. "Liz. _Liz! _What took you so long?! They destroyed the chandelier!"

"I know."

"And the piano!"

"I can see that."

"And a third-century Han dynasty vase!" Kid sobbed. For the third time that morning, his legs gave out beneath him, and he sank to the floor, trembling. "It'll take days to clean all of this up. I'll never be able to explain this to Father. I'm such a failure. A total failure!"

"Oh, shut up. We don't have time for this now!" Liz grabbed at his arm, trying to pull him back up into a standing position. "We have to get out of here, now! We have to go after Marty! Kid, they took your mask, remember?!"

Kid sniffled, trying not to remember.

"Listen," Liz said, pulling on both of his arms now. "If we don't stop Marty, he's going to go all the way to Shibusen, he's going to hand that mask over to Sid, he's going to pass his assignment, and then everybody will know that _we _were the first group of seniors to lose an extracurricular challenge to a bunch of little one-star twerps, and then do you know what's going to happen? Black Star is going to _laugh_ at you!"

"I'll laugh at you too," Patti added. She was cheerfully holding her hand, partially morphed into the barrel of a gun, to Ti's head as she spoke. Ti and his partner were kneeling in front of her with their hands raised above their heads, both looking terrified. Which was probably due to the manic look in Patti's eyes. "Come on, Kid. We gotta go."

But Kid shook his head helplessly. "No. No. No!"

Patti scowled at him. "Now what?"

"_Look _at this place!" Kid wriggled his arms free of Liz's grip and gestured helplessly, his hands sweeping in the direction of the smashed chandelier, the wrecked piano, the utter horror surrounding them on all sides. "I can't leave it like this! I can't—I can't--" He shuddered. "I have to clean this up," he mumbled to himself. Yes. That. As soon as he said the words, he knew that they were true, and he clung desperately to that pure and beautiful truth even as chaos threatened to overwhelm him from all sides. "I have to clean this up. I have to clean this up." It was a good mantra. Good words, that, for the moment, were doing a good job of preventing him from both puking and fainting dead away. "I have to clean this up. I have to--"

"Fine," Patti snapped at him, impatiently. Kid dimly registered that she was in an incredibly foul mood, and getting worse by the minute. Bad news for poor Marty and whichever other kids were with him. "Fine," Patti repeated. "You stay here. Liz and I will get back your stupid mask."

"No way," Liz countered. "Marty's long gone, and he's got way too much of a lead on us. We'll never catch up to him without Beelzebub." She grabbed at Kid's arms again, still trying to pull him up. "Come on! Get it together, Kid!"

And then Kid finally did stand up. But he angrily pulled his arms out of Liz's grip and turned away from her. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. But I have to clean this up." Slowly, he started shuffling back across the room. He needed to find a broom. Yes, a broom. First a broom for the broken glass, and then he could worry about the rest. But a broom first and foremost.

Out the damned room, and down a hallway. Kid forced himself to keep moving. He didn't care about the mask anymore. He didn't care about Marty. He didn't care about whether Black Star was going to laugh at him or not. The image of all of those shards of the broken chandelier scattered gleaming across the ground had lodged in his brain, just as surely as some of the smaller shards of the actual glass had lodged in his knees when he'd knelt among them. There was glass and it was broken and it was _chaos_, and he wouldn't be able to move or think or act until he was able to _fix _that. Or at least clean it up. But once he was done with the chandelier, he would have to move on to the piano, too. And then the vase. And then, picking up the candles. And righting all of the overturned furniture. And fixing the alignment of the picture frames. And—

"FUCK!"

Kid finally saw the source of the initial tremor, the one that they had felt from upstairs. It was also, he realized belatedly, the way that the technician and her gadha partner had been able to enter the house.

The front door had been smashed in, completely knocked out of its frame. A good chunk of the surrounding wall had been wrecked along with it.

Kid forced his eyes away from the awful sight. What had he come over here to do again? Oh, yes. A broom. There were several in a nearby closet.

Kid found his closet, opened the door, and reached for a broom. He could hear Liz yelling at the kids, still trapped in the ballroom. _You little shits! _she was shouting at them. _You did this to him on purpose!_

Well, of course they had. Kid could have told her that much. It didn't take a genius to figure out the strategy that the little students had cooked up. Ti and his technician partner – whatever her name was – had been deliberately left behind as sacrifices. They had known from the beginning that they were going to be taken down by Kid, or Liz, or Patti. Once they had made their presence known, they had been doomed. But they had still pulled off their plan brilliantly. Ti's only job had been to cause as much damage in as little time as possible. Their only goal had been to give Kid a good reason to stay in the house, and not leave to pursue Marty. A darn good reason, by the way.

Kid understood all of this. On a rational level, he understood _exactly _how and why he had been played. But the hell of it was that it didn't matter whether he understood or not. He still wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything else until he had cleaned up the remains of the chandelier. And possibly the piano. And then the vase. And then the candles. And then the—

"Don't." Patti was there, behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist. "Put down the broom, Kid."

"I can't."

"_Put down the goddamn broom, you useless piece of shit!_"

"Okay." Kid did so. Patti let go of him, and he turned around to face her. "You're… You're very angry right now, aren't you?"

"No, duh! Kid should be angry too!" She had bunched up her fists and was screwing up her face, preparing to throw an epic tantrum. "They hit you! In the _head_!" Then her voice broke. "Ti could have killed you. They weren't being careful!" She wiped at her eyes. "I saw it happen. But wasn't fast enough. Didn't shoot in time. I'm sorry."

"Patti." Now it was his turn to slip his arms around her waist, pulling her close. "Hey. Don't cry. They're just kids. They couldn't have killed me if they'd tried."

Patti scowled at him. "Stop being stupid," she said. She pointed toward the wreck at the front of the house, toward the smashed door on the ground. "Look what Ti did to that wall!"

"Is that his resonance attack?"

"Yeah. Carly and Ti. That's kind of their special thing. But Carly's no good at controlling Ti's wavelength." Patti bit her lip. "They could have done _that _to your skull. By accident. Those dumbasses. We had this problem at camp. We toldCarly not to use Ti against _people_, but--"

"Patti, are you not wearing a bra?"

Her scowl deepened. "Are you going to help us take down Marty, or are you just going to give up and let him win?"

"You know I can't leave the house in this state."

"Yes, you _can._" She leaned her head in close to his, pressing against him. Definitely not wearing a bra. But at least she had managed to throw on a T-shirt and jeans, which was an improvement over complete nudity. "Close your eyes," Patti said. "Don't look at the mess."

"But I can't stop _thinking _about it."

"Then think about me," Patti said. "Come on. Resonate with me."

He closed his eyes and did so, easily connecting with the familiar ripple of her soul wavelength. He breathed in and out, slowly, tasting the bitterness of her anger. And he could feel more colors dancing in her wavelength as well. There was the lingering aftertaste of the moment of sharp, heart-clenching fear she had felt, watching helplessly during the moment when Ti's gadha form had connected with the side of Kid's face. There was the bright streak of her pride, especially her pride in her ranking as a Death Scythe, and a cold, clear undercurrent of not wanting to lose to a bunch of children specifically because she was so proud of her title. And bubbling beneath all of this was the laughter in her soul, her gleeful amusement at the utter disaster that their morning had become, a bursting desire to simply laugh endlessly at how _stupid _it all was, from the wrecked chandelier, to Kid's insane reactions, to Marty's incoherent phone call, to the moment when Kid had tried to climb out the upstairs window with his guns in both hands and still not wearing any pants. A dozen little moments of humiliating tragedy that, to Patti, were nothing more than amusing scenes in the brilliant comedy of her life. And there would be more to laugh at, before the night was finished and the sun came up. Much more, she was sure of it – and looking forward to it all. Provided that she could ever convince Kid to go after Marty.

Kid squeezed his arms around her tightly, focusing on the heat of her anger. It was a good heat, calming, and cleansing. Her fury was burning the images of the broken chandelier and the smashed piano out of his mind. He pulled her anger deep into him, drinking from it thirstily, using it to fuel his own dormant rage. And he could feel her pulling at his soul as well, responding to his resonance, drawing the wavelength from his heart and forging it into her bullets. "That's right," Patti sighed. "Your soul makes the best ammunition when you're angry."

"Good. Because I am very, very angry right now. I loved that chandelier."

"Me too. It was so shiny." Patti grinned at him. "Let's go kick Marty's ass." Then she wagged her finger at him disapprovingly. "I told you to close your eyes."

"Fine." He did so, and then he let go of her waist. She took his hand, and began leading him back toward the ballroom. Kid kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut and let Patti take the lead, following the waves of her soul, concentrating on their shared anger so that he wouldn't let any other thoughts distract him.

Kid knew that they were back in the ballroom when he could hear glass crunching beneath feet. "Oh, finally," Liz said. "Let's go."

"Wait," Kid said. He knew better than to open his eyes, but he still managed to point in the direction where he could feel the soul wavelengths of Carly and Ti. "What are we going to do with them?"

"Y-Y-Yeah. Yeah!" Carly stuttered, defiantly. "You can't just leave us here! Ti and I are gonna bring down this entire house, if you guys try to walk away from us!"

"Yes. I am totally going to do that," Ti confirmed. "Exactly that."

Patti laughed at their foolish bravado. Kid momentarily felt like laughing too, but then decided against it. Even with his eyes closed, he could still feel Ti's soul wavelength, and he could sense that the poor boy was many hours away from being able to shift into his weapon form again. Taking three of Liz's bullets directly in his chest had drained him of more than he was apparently willing to reveal to his partner. Still, even without weapon abilities, two desperate teenagers could still do a lot of damage to his house if he just left them behind to run amuck. Kid briefly considered simply shooting them both in the head and knocking them out cold. They certainly deserved as much. But even he couldn't quite bring himself to do such a thing to a pair of Shibusen students. So he finally said, "Patti, get the handcuffs."

"Aye-aye!" Patti let go of his hand, and a moment later, Kid heard her running back up the stairs.

"Wait, what?" Carly sounded confused. "Handcuffs? Why do you have handcuffs?"

Liz coughed.

Patti was back almost instantly. "Where?" she asked.

Kid mentally browsed through locations in the house, trying to think of a spot that would still be relatively intact. "Upstairs, east wing, full bathroom. The vertical handlebar in the shower."

"Right. You heard him." Liz stomped across the glass-strewn carpet impatiently. "March, kiddies."

Three sets of footsteps marched out of the ballroom and up the stairs. Patti took Kid's hand again, leading him after them. By the time that they were back on the second story, Kid risked opening his eyes. Things were better up here, although there were still quite a few crooked picture frames to worry about. Liz had twisted Carly's arm behind her back and was frog-marching her down the hallway in front of them. Ti followed a step behind her, morosely.

They reached the bathroom, and Liz pushed both of the kids into the shower. "Wow," Carly said. "I think this bathroom is as big as my entire dorm suite."

"It's probably bigger," Patti said, cheerfully handing the handcuffs to her sister.

Liz snapped one cuff around Carly's wrist, passed the chain connecting the cuffs behind the handlebar affixed to the wall of the shower, and then closed the other cuff around Ti's wrist. "There," she said, satisfied with her handiwork. "I'd suggest you two sit down and think long and hard about how _dead _you're going to be when we get back. Also, how much it's going to cost you to replace that piano. And that chandelier."

"Which, by the way," Kid added, "was made entirely of rather expensive Swiss crystal." He eyed the shower handlebar for a moment, wondering how long it would take Ti to rip it off the wall. The boy was massive, built like a tank, with thick muscles visible all along his neck and arms. His wrists were almost too big for the handcuffs. But he was also still badly drained from having been shot by Liz. Kid decided that for the time being, Ti was no threat to any of his bathroom fixtures. "We'll be back shortly," Kid said, turning and walking out of the bathroom. Liz and Patti followed him.

Kid paused for just a moment, closing his eyes and trying to sense the presence of the two technicians he had sensed on the roof earlier. Wherever they were, they were long gone, far out of his range. On their way to Shibusen, no doubt. "We have to hurry," he said, striding back down the stairs and toward the hole in the wall that had previously been his front door. "Liz. Patti. Talk to me." _Keep me focused. _"Who exactly are we dealing with, here?"

"You're still wearing your pajama shirt, you know," Liz pointed out. "Hold on, let me get your cloak."

"We don't have time for that." Kid stepped carefully around the twisted wreckage of his door and out into the cool early-morning air. The moon in the sky above grinned down at him, drooling blood, but providing plenty of useful illumination. Kid ignored the moon's grin, the same way that he ignored the destruction of his home and the thought of all of those mismatched pieces of broken chandelier scattered all over the floor in the lower ballroom. He was only able to ignore these things, of course, because Liz and Patti were with him now, resonating with him, keeping his thoughts sharp and focused on his anger. He could feel their souls pushing at him, driving him forward. They were on the hunt now, and Kid's ability to focus on his prey was the only thing holding him together. But the three of them wouldn't be able to keep up this resonance forever. Eventually they would have to stop, and then Kid could have a good long freakout about the state of the house. But that, at least, could wait until after he had prevented a couple of very, very doomed little technicians from passing their asinine extracurricular assignment.

"Tell me about Marty's team," Kid repeated, as Liz and Patti settled into his holsters, and Beelzebub launched into the air. "I need to know who we're dealing with."

"Right. Okay." Liz spoke to him more clearly from the space inside his mind than she could from within her holster. "Marty's the team leader. He's also the youngest. Kind of a weird kid, always a bundle of nerves. He has a little bit of a soul perception ability, but not much. Elsie is his partner. She's a bow. She's kind of like us, she has to use her technician's soul to make arrows. Neither of them can do a resonance attack yet. They're kind of losers, actually. But for some reason they're working out as the team leaders. Carly is one of the support technicians, and Timirbaran – I'm sorry, Ti, everyone calls him Ti – is her partner. Ti is basically their tank. Well, you've met him. You know now."

"He was almost too big for the handcuffs!" Patti laughed. "Kid, you have girly wrists compared to Ti."

"I think everybody has girly wrists compared to Ti," Liz pointed out.

"Forget about wrists," Kid snapped. "Tell me about the third technician."

"Jozsef. Transferred from the European branch school last year. I think his partner is still Diego, who is--"

"To the left," Patti said.

Kid steered Beelzebub into a dodge at the last moment. Something whickered through the air where his head had been moments before. He pulled Beelzebub down, closer to the rooftops flying by beneath them, and finally spotted a small figure running down a street. It was definitely one of the technicians that he had sensed earlier. And the little idiot was heading straight into a narrow alley.

Kid drew his guns, and flew into the mouth of the alley. Ahead of him, the poor student was still running for his life. "Don't hold back," Kid told Liz and Patti, drawing out his arms and taking aim.

"_Duck!_" Patti screamed.

But by then it was too late. Something smashed into Kid's left wrist, hard enough to shatter bone. He hissed, but refused to lose his grip on his gun. He realized his mistake belatedly; Diego, whatever he was, had deliberately waited until Kid had exposed his arms before making his attack. A moment later, Kid looked down and saw exactly what Diego was. The technician in the alley beneath him was twirling his boleros above his head, building up a wicked momentum, preparing for another strike.

"Ow," Kid said. He wasn't sure how badly his wrist had been damaged, but it sure hurt. An experimental twitch of his fingers, however, revealed that everything was still in working order. Good. And whatever had gone wrong in his wrist, it was already healing itself. Being a reaper and having a god's body did have its advantages.

"He'll go for your legs next," Liz said. "That's kind of what we taught him to do at camp."

"Good strategy," Kid admitted. "But no good against us." He raised his guns and fired. The first volley knocked Diego out of his partner's hands, slamming him to the ground and causing him to writhe back into his human form; the second volley went straight into Jozsef's knee caps. The boy staggered, then thumped to the ground, landing gracelessly on his rear.

"Boleros are slow compared to guns!" Patti laughed.

Kid leapt off his skateboard and to the ground, running toward the two students. "You're not dead, are you?" he asked. It was about as much concern as he could possibly muster at that point.

"_Ow, my knees!_" Jozsef hissed and clenched his fists. "_You broke both of my knees!_"

Kid scowled at him. "You should thank me," he said. "I made them even. That's more than you bothered to do for me." He winced and rubbed at his sore wrist. "Also,_ knees_ don't break_. _But you might have matching shattered patellas right now. Make sure that you can say it properly." He turned to Diego. "You need to get your partner to an emergency room. Sooner rather than later."

Diego stared at him.

"This," Liz said. "This is why you weren't sent to camp with Patti and me."

Patti laughed and laughed. "Busted his knees, busted his knees!" she sang. Being on the hunt had apparently buoyed her spirits considerably.

"You can take care of your partner, right?" Kid asked Diego one last time.

"Yes. Sir. Yes, I'll take care of him."

"Okay, good. Whatever." Kid hopped back onto Beelzebub, and took to the air again. He didn't have time to deal with the two students any more. Jozsef and Diego were playing the same role as Carly and Ti; pawns sacrificed to distract him from the king. Kid had to admit, the students certainly had admirable courage, if they were willing to throw themselves into fights that they knew that they couldn't possibly win, just to give their team leader a chance to make a run for it.

"Next time," Kid said as he looked down at Jozsef and Diego for the last time, "stick to the high ground. Stay on the rooftops. Diego, you can do more damage as a surprise attack from above than you can launched from the ground." Then he flew back up above the rooftops.

"How's your wrist?" Liz asked, as Death City flew by beneath them.

"Not as bad as my face." He winced. "It's healing. I think."

"Is it broken?"

"I don't think so…"

"Don't worry," Patti said. "If they broke your wrist, then Patti can break your other one, so then they'll be even!"

Kid sniffled gratefully. "Thank you, Patti." Then he frowned. "Marty's dead ahead. I can feel him. Who taught these kids to be such sneaky little bastards, anyway?!"

"Now, be fair," Liz said. "They're doing the exact same things that _we _were taught to do. When you know that you're up against an opponent who totally outclasses you, you've got to resort to guerilla tactics."

"Gorilla! Grrrrrrrrrrrrr," Patti added.

"I'm surprised that Diego managed to score a hit on you, though," Liz said. "Didn't you sense him coming? Whatever happened to your shields, you idiot?"

"I was distracted," Kid snapped, defensively. And he _was _still very distracted. The broken pieces of the chandelier were still lodged in his brain, and he could feel them – them and the piano, and the vase, and the candles, and the crooked pictures – seething in the back of his mind, clamoring for his attention, waiting to trap his thoughts in an unstoppable fixation. He was resisting the pull of those thoughts as much as he could, and his resonance with Liz and Patti was certainly helping in that regard. But he wasn't sure how much longer he would be able to concentrate on the hunt. Plus, now he had the added distraction of the uneven pain in his body, one wrist throbbing and swelling while the other was perfectly fine.

He really, really wanted to kill Marty. And possibly Sid, too.

Kid shook his head, clearing his thoughts, and forced himself to concentrate on the trail of the pair of souls that he sensed running below him. _There._ Down below. Kid looked down, and saw a slight, red-headed figure with a bow slung over his back and a messenger slung over his opposite shoulder, pounding down the middle of a wide avenue as if his life depended on it. Which, at this point, it probably did. Kid could sense the fear roiling through the boy's soul wavelength, and that of his partner, too. Fear, but also determination. Marty wanted to pass his assignment, and wasn't going to stop running until he was taken down by force.

Kid was looking forward to doing so, and doing so as brutally as possible.

"Stupid," Liz said, as Kid drew both her and Patti and took aim. "He's running with Elsie on his back. _Stupid. _Now he'll never draw her in time."

Kid didn't bother to comment on this. He just started firing.

But the boy was fast. Amazingly fast. "Now _that's _a serpentine!" Patti laughed.

Kid grit his teeth and tried to focus his rage. If it hadn't been for his wrist, he wouldn't be having such difficulty hitting the boy. And now they were running out of time. Within seconds, Marty had reached the wide pavilion that spread out in front of the Shibusen campus. He dodged and weaved across the bricks, utterly undaunted by the lack of cover from the gunfire hailing down upon him. Kid risked looking away from Marty for a moment, and saw Sid, sitting in the middle of the enormous staircase that fronted the school, watching Marty pound toward him with what might have been an expression of amused interest. With the undead, it was kind of hard to tell.

The drooling moon was lowering to the horizon. The time couldn't have been much past four in the morning, but the city was already stirring around them. Lights were coming on in houses, and the earliest risers were already starting their day. Kid feared that the cacophony of Liz and Patti's gunfire might have been playing a part in waking up the city as well.

Kid simply didn't want the humiliation to drag on any longer. "We end this," he said. "Now." He ceased firing, pushed Beelzebub into a thrust, and sped through the air across the pavilion. He went up and over Marty's head, then landed right at the base of the stairs that Sid was sitting on. Beelzebub vanished, and Kid planted his feet firmly on the ground, turning to face Marty. "I'm sorry," he said to Sid, even though his back was to the other man, "but I'm not going to let your brats pass this assignment."

"Go ahead," Sid rumbled. Kid could feel the bemusement radiating from his soul wavelength. "Do whatever you want to. If Marty can't get past you, then he doesn't deserve to pass. Hmm. Are those your pajamas?"

Kid could already feel Liz and Patti's needles charging with his rage. He crouched low to the ground, sighting his eyes on the boy still suicidally pounding directly toward him. Marty ran and ran and ran, ceaselessly, until he reached a point where he was only a mere ten yards in front of Kid. Then he stopped.

And then, he pulled the bow off his back, and started to draw an arrow.

_Stupid, _Kid thought. His cannons were still charging, but close to ready to fire. If Marty had any sort of soul perception ability, even just a little bit as Liz had said, then surely he was able to see what Kid was doing. He probably _could_ see, in fact. Kid could certainly see the terror roiling throughout the boy's wavelength. The poor kid was close to pissing himself, it looked like. _Am I really that scary? _Kid thought.

"Yes," Liz answered.

"Totally," Patti added. "Especially when you do the glowy-eyes thing. Like now."

"Martin Feldmann," Kid shouted, pulling his cannons together in front of him and preparing to fire. "Surrender now, and we can end this peacefully. You're a student. I don't want to hurt you. Just give me back my mask, and we can all walk away from this."

Marty trembled. But he dug his feet into the ground, took a deep breath, and pulled a shimmering soul-arrow across the string of his bow. "_No_," he said. "I don't surrender. We won't surrender!"

Kid couldn't help but smile at that. "Good answer," he said. "I actually am sorry about this, now. Just a li--"

Marty shot his arrow.

At first, Kid blinked at him stupidly, unsure of what he had just seen. "Hey," he growled. "Hey! I wasn't done _talking _at you! And… I'm right in front of you, you mouth-breathing idiot! How could you have missed me?!"

"Oh, Marty," Liz groaned. "I don't remember his aim being that bad…"

Marty shakily raised his bow again. He had just fired one arrow straight into the ground, and was already cocking another one. "Get out of my way," he tried to threaten, although his terror made his voice crack comically. "Or I'll shoot again!"

"You call that _shooting?!_" Kid was really furious now. It was bad enough that he had been surprised and humiliated over and over again that morning. It was bad enough that his own home was a wreck. It was bad enough that a snot-nosed little one-star technician was now standing in front of him and shouting challenges, and said snot-nosed little one-star technician had stolen his mask, and he _still hadn't gotten it back. _All of that was bad enough, of course. But to top it all off, to discover that his opponent didn't even have enough wits about him to shoot at a target directly in front of his face…

That was beyond humiliating. That was beyond infuriating. Kid wanted to utterly destroy the boy. "Liz, Patti!" he shouted. "Don't hold back!" He crouched and took aim again, preparing to fire all of his seething rage in one apocalyptic burst. He was so busy narrowing his focus – and his aim – on Marty's hateful face, that he didn't even notice the ground beginning to rumble beneath him.

By the time that Kid felt the bricks shift beneath his feet, however, it was too late.

_Oh, right, _he thought, as what felt like several tons of highly-pressurized water erupted through the ground beneath him. _There's a water main right here. Of course there is. Right in the center of the campus. Dividing it right down the middle…_

So that's what Marty's arrow had been aiming for.

_Brilliant._

Kid dimly heard Liz and Patti screaming. With a flash of alarm, he briefly wondered if they were hurt. Then he realized that several seconds ago, a flying brick, having exploded upward during the moment that the water main had burst, had somehow managed to slam him right in the crotch.

For a moment, Kid was knocked breathless, overwhelmed by the sudden flash of pain from between his legs, and the relentless explosion of water slamming his body. He wasn't sure if he fell or if he actually managed to step away from the worst of the eruption, but a second later, he was on his hands and knees, scrambling over the ground, trying to get away from the pressurized spray. He coughed up a lungful of water, and groped blindly around, trying to get his bearings. He found Liz's hand, then Patti's; somehow, the three of them managed to pull each other up and stumble away from the epicenter of the water. Kid splashed across the ground, wiping water from his eyes, squinting through the early-morning gloom to try to find Marty again.

There. Running up the stairs, faster than a bat out of hell. Within a few dozen more steps, he was going to reach Sid. Marty reached into the messenger bag that he was wearing, and pulled out Kid's skull mask, preparing for the handoff.

"_Liz! Patti!_" Kid ran across the wet bricks, starting up the stairs.

"No!" A tiny wisp of a girl suddenly leapt in front of him, flinging out her arms and blocking his path. It was Elsie, the bow. "Don't you dare hurt Marty!"

"Elsie." Liz stepped forward, and placed one dripping-wet hand on the girl's shoulder. "It's over. Move."

Elsie stared up at Liz, her eyes wide and frightened. Liz had to have been at least twice as tall as her. And she was, of course, a Death Scythe, regardless of how non-threatening she might have looked in her currently soaked-to-the-bone state. But Elsie had desperation on her side. So she did the only thing that she could do. She lunged forward and bit Liz on the arm.

"_Argh!_" Liz recoiled, more disgusted than hurt. "What the hell? What the _hell?!_"

Patti lunged at Elsie, then, but the tiny girl was a quick dodge. "Come _back _here!" Patti growled. That seemed to only terrify Elsie more. So Elsie leapt around Liz and started pounding back down the stairs.

"If this leaves a scar you are _so _gonna get it!" Liz shouted after her, turning to pursue.

"Wait, wait! Liz, Patti, wait!" Kid shouted at them, but they were no longer listening to him. His partners were running down the steps after Elsie, trying in vain to grab at the tiny, terrified little girl.

_Damn!_ Kid thought. One more distraction thrown into their path. One more attempt to keep him away from Marty. And now his resonance with Liz and Patti was broken, too. Kid could no longer feel their anger burning in him. And without their focus to steady him, he could already feel the broken shards of the chandelier digging into his brain again, taking over his other thoughts, filling his mind with visions of all of that mess to clean up, all of that knocked-over furniture to upright, all of those picture frames to straighten…

It felt as though Marty were growing further and further away.

Then Kid realized with a start that Marty _was _growing further and further away. That was because he was still running up the stairs, whereas Kid had been lost in his thoughts and rooted to the spot. Taking a deep breath, Kid forced himself to focus. All he had to do was keep it together for a few more seconds. He was older, taller, and in better physical condition than Marty. He could take the stairs two or three at a time; and he did so, rushing quickly up behind Marty.

But Kid wasn't going to make it in time. He could see that now. Marty was only a few steps away from Sid, already holding out the skull mask toward his teacher, his arm stretched out to the limit. Even as he closed the gap between them, Kid realized that he would only have one chance to stop Marty.

So Kid turned his final step into a flying leap. He tackled Marty, slamming the boy down brutally down to the staircase.

Marty's shoulder hit the edge of a stair. Kid both heard and felt the sickening popping sound. Kid's own left knee smashed into the edge of a stair as well, but at least it didn't break.

Kid held Marty pinned down. Marty gasped and wriggled, trying to free himself. But it was no use. He'd finally been caught. Marty stretched out his left arm, his left hand still clutching Kid's mask in a death grip. He groaned and stretched, trying to reach Sid, who was still sitting a few steps above them. "Mr. Sid," Marty gasped.

Sid gazed down at them both. "It's not over until you say it's over, Marty. It's your call." But he made no move to reach down and take the mask from Marty's outstretched grip. Clearly, he wasn't going to lift a finger to help his student.

"Marty, give me the mask," Kid said.

"_No!_"

Kid reached for the mask, ready to pry it from Marty's bone-white fingers if that was what it would take. "I will break your fingers if I have to. Each and every one of them. _Give me back my mask._"

Marty shuddered, then slowly began to pull in his arm, making as if to hand the mask back to Kid.

"Good call," Kid said. He finally grasped the mask in his hand. "You--"

Then Marty lunged upward – despite his dislocated shoulder, despite the pressure of Kid pinning him down – and struck quick as a snake.

He licked the mask.

"Ew!" Kid instinctively recoiled, letting go of the mask as he did so. Marty writhed out from underneath him. Before Kid even realized what was happening, it was over. Marty crawled up and over three steps, then dropped the mask directly into his teacher's lap.

Then Marty slumped down over the stairs, collapsing with a groan. "Did we pass?" he asked Sid.

Sid stood up, wiped Marty's drool off the mask with one enormous finger, then nodded approvingly. "Congratulations. Your entire team passes."

"…Hooray." Then Marty's eyes rolled dangerously back into his head. "Ow. My shoulder…"

"Looks dislocated," Sid said. He knelt down, and helped pull Marty up into a sitting position. "Hold on. Think happy thoughts, because I'm going to pop that back in right now." He glanced down at Kid. "Do I want to ask what you've done to the other members of the team?"

Kid was still frozen on the steps, however, blinking up at the two of them stupidly. "What? What?" He felt the world swimming around him. "What just… happened?"

"You lost," Sid said.

"_Arrrrrgh!_" Marty hissed in his breath as Sid popped his shoulder back into its socket.

Then Sid tried to hand the mask back to Kid. "Here, take this. It's yours."

Kid stared at him. Just stared, for a good long moment, while his brain struggled to process what was going on. Finally, however, something clicked. He stood up, and haughtily swatted away Sid's outstretched hand holding the offered masked. "No," he said. "You can go ahead and disinfect that first, _then _give it back to me. I'll be expecting my mask returned before noon." He turned his furious glare upon Marty, who was still sitting down on the steps, his face pale and his eyes glassy with pain. "You fought dirty," he said, with a disapproving sneer.

Marty looked ready to sink into a hole and die. "I'm s-s-sorry, sir…"

"Don't listen to him," Sid said quickly. "You fought _smart. _He's just pouting." Sid stood up, looming over Kid. "You should be proud of these students."

Kid said nothing, just turned his head away and seethed silently.

"Hey. Hey!" From the bottom of the stairs, Liz was shouting up at him. "Hey, did Marty win?"

Kid turned to look down at her. She and Patti and Elsie were standing at the bottom of the stairs, not too far from where the enormous geyser of water was still busily erupting through the ground. They were all soaked, and getting more soaked by the spray from the burst water main by the moment, but none of them seemed to care. Liz's hair was plastered to her head, her wet clothes clinging to her body. She cupped her hands and shouted up at Kid again, "_Did you lose?_"

"…Yeah."

Down below, Elsie's eyes suddenly went wide. "We won? We won!" She hopped up and down on her tiny feet excitedly. "Ohmigosh! Ohmigosh! Ohmigosh Marty we WON!"

Marty gave Elsie a trembling thumbs-up, as Sid helped him back to his feet. "Hooray," he said. Then he and Sid started shakily descending back down the staircase. Kid followed them a step behind.

At the base of the stairs, Elsie was still celebrating excitedly. "We did it we did it we did it oh my gosh we DID it!"

Patti grabbed Elsie's tiny arms and whirled her around, laughing. "Yay, Elsie! You did it!" She danced with Elsie beneath the spray from the burst water main. "Whoo-hoo, go ELSIE!"

Liz applauded them both, approvingly. "Congratulations, Elsie!"

"Hey!" Kid yelled down at them angrily. "Just who's side are you two on, anyway?!"

"The side that's actually _proud _when Shibusen students kick ass and take names," Liz said, smirking up at him. "Could you stop being an asshole for like, five seconds? For once? Don't be immature about this."

"I'm not being immature," Kid seethed, as he stomped angrily down the last of the steps.

Elsie was still bouncing up and down excitedly, babbling happily at Patti. "I didn't think that we were going to make it, I mean when he landed in front of us, I was so freaked out, I was thinking, oh my gosh I totally do not want to be hit with a death cannon, I bet that would've hurt so much, but then Marty was so freaked out that he was going to pee-pee himself, and I didn't think that I could make an arrow strong enough to break the water pipe, but Marty was just sooooo scared and it was like, wow, I can take that feeling and make a really huge arrow out of it, and I did and it was totally awesome, and then the water main blew up and I was like, oh my gosh I cannot believe we just _did _that, and--"

"How did you know that I was standing on top of the water main?" Kid snapped.

"Because that pipe runs exactly through the dead center of this campus," Marty explained, breathily, still leaning against Sid. "It bisects this pavilion, and that staircase. Right through the center. And you, sir. You always stand right in the center, of wherever you are… I knew that if you landed Beelzebub, you would land right on top of that pipe. Right in the center."

Kid stared at him, again.

Liz suddenly placed her hand on Kid's shoulder. "See? This is all your fault, because your movements are still too predictable." Then she leaned in close and whispered into his ear, "Stop being an asshole, _now._"

Kid nodded, reluctantly. Liz stepped away from him. Then, slowly, he held out his hand to Marty. "Congratulations," he said. "Your team is the first team to win a challenge against Liz, Patti, and me. So… Good job. I suppose."

Marty reached out one trembling hand, and took Kid's. He shook Kid's hand, slowly at first, then with a bit more confidence. His soul wavelength was beginning to tingle with the first cautious fluttering of pride. "Thank you, sir," he said. Finally, he grinned happily. "Thank you very much."

"Don't thank me yet," Kid said. "You and the rest of your team are still going to pay for all the damage you've done to our home. And this, too," he added, gesturing toward the fountain still erupting from the burst water main.

"Later," Sid said. "We can worry about that later. Marty, Elsie, come with me now." He started to lead Marty away, and Elsie followed. "We're going to the emergency room, to get someone to look at Marty's shoulder. The city can take care of that pipe."

"Don't forget to return my mask later!" Kid shouted after them. Then he turned back to Liz and Patti. "Let's get out of here."

The three of them trudged silently back across the pavilion, toward the city that was finally beginning to wake up. Slowly, the world around them lightened; the moon finally dipped below the horizon, and the sun, yawning and blinking blearily, slowly began to rise in the sky. Kid shivered, and tried to wring out the sleeves of his completely soaked pajama shirt. But it was no use. His clothes were drenched, and clinging in a rather disgusting way to his body. His wrist and his face no longer hurt, and felt as if they had completely healed. But the sharp pain in his balls, where he had been hit by that flying brick, was receding a lot more slowly than he would have liked. The knee that he had knocked against the stairs during his attempt to tackle Marty still hurt, too. He was in a bad mood. Oh, and his house had been destroyed. And he had just been utterly humiliated by a team of one-star students. Those thoughts, too, were rapidly contributing to his bad mood.

They walked gloomily down the still-deserted city streets. Finally, Liz broke the silence. "Can't you at least be happy for them?"

"I don't see why I should be," Kid pouted.

"Because they kicked your ass, and were awesome," Patti answered.

"You have to admit," Liz said, "those kids must have had balls of steel, to agree to take on _us _as an extracurricular. Balls of _steel._"

"You're just saying that because they're your students."

"They're not my students, Patti and I just chaperoned them during summer camp. But… Hmm. I guess that's enough, really." She was smiling to herself in an oddly satisfied way. "I don't see how you can't be proud of Shibusen right now."

"Huh. I never figured you for the type to have school spirit." Suddenly Kid froze in mid-step. "Oh, no. Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Singing…" Kid scowled. "Some idiot singing at the top of his lungs, at five in the goddamn morning."

"_I am the great BLAAAAAACK STAAAAAR… Unparalleled in the city, in the state, in the world… GOOD MOoooooOOOORNING Mister SUN, good morning from BLAAAAAACK STAAAAAAR…."_

"Of course." Kid impatiently wiped his soaked bangs away from his face. "Of _course. _Who else do we know who actually wakes up at this ungodly hour?" He considered making an escape on Beelzebub, then realized that it was too late. Black Star and Tsubaki were already coming down the street toward them. "I don't need this right now," Kid growled.

"_BLAAAAAAACK STAAAAAAR is coming to-- _Huzzuhwhat?" Black Star paused when he caught sight of Kid and his partners. Then he hurriedly ran toward them. "No _way! _What are you guys doing here?!" He blinked when he saw the state that they were in. "So I bet you guys know why we don't have any running water?" He grinned at them. "Kid, are those your pajamas?"

Tsubaki stared at them, horrified. "What happened to you?" she asked.

"What did you guys _do_?!" Black Star asked, somewhat less sympathetically. "We don't have any running water, our neighbors don't have any water, and you sure look like--"

"We didn't do it," Kid snapped, quickly. "We were just… standing there when it happened."

"When _what _happened?"

"Later. I'll tell you later. I can't deal with this right now--"

Black Star moved to block Kid from stepping past him. "No way! Whatever this story is, I've gotta hear it _now." _He still had that cheerful, almost hungry grin on his face. Kid fervently wished that Black Star would at least be stupid enough to not be able to sense when Kid was clearly feeling humiliated. But unfortunately, no such luck.

Liz sighed. "You might as well tell them now, Kid," she said, "before they hear about it at school."

"We can't stop to chat," Kid snapped at her. "Carly and Ti are still handcuffed in the bathroom--"

"Oh, now I have GOT to hear this story," Black Star said, his grin widening further.

"No," Kid said. "No. You're just going to laugh at me."

"What if I promise not to laugh?"

"You're not going to keep that promise."

"I'm Black Star, I always keep my promises!"

"Okay. Fine." Kid took a deep breath, steeling himself. Liz was right, it probably was best for Black Star to hear about this now and get it over with, rather than having him hear about it later, via what would likely be wildly exaggerated accounts from the other Shibusen students. "Here's what happened. Sid sent a team of one-star students to attack us, and--"

"And you _lost _to them?!" Black Star had already reached the obvious conclusion.

"Well, we--"

"_Nya ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!_" Black Star doubled over laughing, clutching at his stomach. "You lost?! You _lost?! _To a bunch of _one-stars?!_"

Kid seethed with fury. "You promised you wouldn't laugh!"

"I said that I keep my promises, but I didn't actually _make _that promise!" He was close to rolling on the ground with laughter now. "A-a-a-a-and you're still in your pajamas? Seriously? Are those your pajamas?! _Aaaaaaaaaah ha ha ha ha HA HA HA!_"

Patti was laughing now, too. "Still in his pajamas! Still in his pajamas!"

"Liz, are you all right?" Tsubaki asked, actually showing concern.

"Been better."

"But why are you all wet?"

"Get Black Star to shut up, and we'll tell you this story. Or maybe I'll tell it. Kid, I understand that you're upset, but could you please stop with the glowy-eyes thing?"

"I'm not doing the glowy-eyes thing."

"Yes, you are."

Black Star finally stopped laughing. He looked up at Kid. "Oooh, with the glowy eyes now? Geez, Kid. Take a chill pill."

Kid grit his teeth. It was kind of hard for him to calm down, what with the broken pieces of the chandelier still digging into his brain, the thought of two idiot students still held captive in his bathroom demanding his immediate concern, and now the added humiliation of Black Star laughing in his face. "What are you two doing out at this hour, anyway?" Kid snapped at Black Star and Tsubaki.

"Looking for a place that's open and serving breakfast," Black Star answered.

"I can't make tea without water," Tsubaki said, almost apologetically, "and, er, we couldn't exactly start our morning training on empty stomachs."

Kid rubbed at his temples. "I don't think most places will be open at this hour…"

"Plan B was to show up at Soul and Maka's place and demand some grub," Black Star said. "They cook all the freakin' time, you know? And I bet they haven't lost their water."

Kid scowled at him. "You'd seriously go knocking on their door at five in the morning and just expect them to share their breakfast with you?"

"No duh. That's what real friendship is!" Black Star grinned at him. "Tsubaki and I do that all the time anyway. It's okay, Maka's cool with it. Don't worry, though, I would never do that to you. 'Cause I know that you're a dick." He eyed Kid critically. "You look like you need some breakfast, too. Come with us?"

"We can't. Carly and Ti--"

"—Will be fine, for a little while longer," Liz said, neatly interrupting Kid's protest. "Let's go with them. You need some time to cool off before you take another look at the house again, anyway."

Kid nodded slowly. "Maybe you're right." He wasn't very much looking forward to seeing what the remains of the house looked like in daylight, either way. "But my clothes…"

"It's okay," Patti said, cheerfully. "We're all friends here!"

Kid tried not to think too hard about the very noticeable fact that Patti was wearing a soaked T-shirt and no bra. "Sure, okay," he said. "We're all friends here." He closed his eyes. "So let's go bother Soul and Maka. They're already awake, anyway. Making cinnamon rolls. Which will be done in exactly thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds."

He opened his eyes again, and found that everyone was staring at him. "What?"

"Kid," Liz said slowly. "How do you know that?"

"Hmm." He tapped his fingers against his holsters, frowning. "You know… I have no idea. Absolutely no idea."

"Cinnamon rolls! Awesome!" Black Star pumped his fist excitedly in the air. "Let's go!"

The five of them continued down the street together. Black Star started singing again. Liz and Patti took Kid's arms, trying to infect him with their cheer. It wasn't working – Kid was perfectly content to continue moping about his defeat, at least for a while longer – but it at least helped take his mind off the broken chandelier. A little bit.

The shards of shattered chandelier crystal were still there, digging into the back of his mind, demanding his attention. But the call of the cinnamon rolls was stronger. Kid let himself focus on that, and finally relaxed, at least somewhat. The chandelier could wait. _We're all friends here. _Who needed to worry about cleaning up the smashed remains of fifty pounds of irreplaceable Swiss crystal, when he had his friends with him?

_I do_, Kid thought, answering his own question. He chuckled bitterly, and ignored the curious look that Patti shot him in response.

It was all right, though. The chandelier, the piano, the vase, the front door, the candles, the furniture, the picture frames – everything that had been broken and ruined, he could let himself worry about later_. _Even if he couldn't avoid having his coming breakdown, even if it was completely inevitable at that point, he could at least delay it for a little while longer.

The cinnamon rolls were calling again.

Ten minutes and twenty-two seconds.


End file.
